Ranking well, or developing traffic - what’s more important?
Now, right off the bat I’d forgive you if you said “Well, ranking well gets you traffic!”. While this is very technically true, tell me when the last time was you set out to rank # 1 for a phase, did it and saw huge amounts of traffic? I mean, “blow your mind” traffic - not an extra 10 visits per day. That’s right, 99% of the time the answer is, you didn’t. You didn’t rank # 1, so you didn’t see the huge amount of traffic. …and that disappointed you. No biggie, I say. Had you been watching your analytics like you should be every day, you may have noticed your traffic isn’t really coming from the phrases you thought you should chase. In fact, most of your traffic is coming from very obscure phrases that simply never occurred to you. These phrases are refered to as the “long tail” phrases. Individually they don’t bring in much traffic. Collectively, though, they can easily deliver more traffic that even the best phrase you’re chasing. Pay attention to these phrases and make sure you get some content up to target them directly. You might not be able to own that killer phrase and beat everyone to the punch, but you can own dozens of smaller-trafficed phrases and have more traffic, overall, than others. In the business of online ad revenue, more traffic means more money. Too many times I hear people say, even now, it’s important that they be number one for a certain phrase. In some cases, it’s a legitimate statement. If you target a specific niche deeply enough, it makes perfect sense. If your sole product is “Lead Free Red Tractor Paint”, and there’s an ongoing market for it, then ranking # 1 for the phrase makes sense and is likely easily achieved. If, however, you’re trying to ranking number 1 for “tractor”, you’ll be frustrated for sure. Best to step back, examine those long-tail phrases and scope out the real opportunities to grown incremental, long-term traffic. If you set your goals short-term, any success you enjoy will fizzle quickly for lack of long-term planning. Focusing on being # 1 is an outdated myth. Focusing on your analytics and growing your business by tracking real results, well, there’s gold in that plan.
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